“Suddenly there was a hand on my bottom . . .” was the rather atypical headline that ran in Germany’s ordinarily conservative daily newspaper Die Welt on January 4. It described a riot-like series of sexual assaults and robberies carried out on New Year’s Eve in the center of Cologne on the Domplatz, the plaza between the city’s train station and its world-famous cathedral. The assailants were mostly described as Arab-looking. Thus far 120 victims have filed criminal complaints, two of them for rape. Descriptions of the assaults have appeared in newspapers across Germany. The stories are varied and shocking. (“They made a kind of wall around us,” one of two high-school girls surrounded by a gang of youths told the Remscheider General-Anzeiger. “They shouted, groped us, reached under our clothes and undid their pants. It was disgusting and humiliating.”)
We are witnessing the inevitable turning point in Germany’s attitude towards its recent rendezvous with mass immigration, which has brought well over a million newcomers, mostly young men, from the war zones of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The most shocking element of the stories is not their content but the fact that they were not made public until several days after the assaults. The Cologne police appear to have lied to downplay incidents they knew would be politically explosive, reporting on New Year’s morning that the celebrations had been “largely peaceful.” But the newsweekly Die Zeit reported on January 7 that the police had detained 70 men that night, many of whom could speak no German at all, and let them go. One can accept the Cologne police chief’s account of his men’s thinking: Where officers are overwhelmed by the size of a crowd — a thousand or so versus a couple dozen — the wise tactic is to clear the area rather than try to make arrests. But one cannot understand how the police expected their account to stand up when iPhone videos proving the contrary were lighting up German social media sites and getting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
A scandalous political correctness has descended on Germany. Cologne’s mayor Henriette Reker, who became an object of national sympathy when she was stabbed during the mayoral campaign last year, has in recent days been ridiculed for saying that any woman who wants can keep an importunate man at “arm’s length.” Thomas de Maizière, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s interior minister, has criticized those who leap to the conclusion that the attackers had an Arab background. Such rumors can indeed spark baseless hatred, and are not to be indulged uncritically. But in the age of the Internet, it doesn’t require a months-long investigation to figure out the truth. Go to YouTube, tap in “Köln” and “Silvester” (German for New Year’s Eve), and you will discover a great big crowd of men of Mediterranean background milling about the Domplatz.
Since the end of World War II, and largely as a result of it, Germany has been much more restrictive of speech than other Western democracies. It is not, strictly speaking, a country of free expression. It long banned the Communist party, Scientology, and (until last year) Mein Kampf. State investigators regularly use video cameras to watch demonstrations for extremism.
Since Merkel expressed Germany’s willingness to take in 800,000 migrants last summer, the government has worked assiduously to monitor negative commentary. It first urged newspaper editors to suppress some of the more heated online comments responding to migration reports. In recent months it has sought to do the same with social media. The Washington Post recently reported that Germany had reached an agreement with three social networking sites (Facebook, Google, and Twitter) establishing the principle that the sites are to edit their content based on German law rather than company policies.
As a constitutional matter, this is a good thing. The German government is the duly constituted leadership of the German people. It, and not any foreign corporation, is authorized to lay down the law regarding what constitutes a menace to public order.
But the rules that protect minorities from mobs can be used to protect politicians from democracy. There may or may not be an increasing tendency to racism in Germany. But there is certainly an increasing tendency to brand as “racist” positions contrary to the interests of the government.
It may backfire — indeed, appears to be backfiring. People who have so far been patient with Merkel are beginning to worry that the crazy scenes in front of the Cologne cathedral will soon be repeated countrywide. Ten percent now tell pollsters that they would vote for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party if elections were held today.
It is dangerous to constrict the range of things voters can say about government policies, especially when those policies are — like Merkel’s migration policy — irregular, and likely to change the country at its core.
No doubt there is a danger of incendiary reactions when people hear of mobs of Muslim foreigners groping young women in front of the country’s most recognizable Christian landmark. But any government attempt to minimize or ignore such events would be a terrible mistake. It would be more likely to whip tempers up than to calm them down.
